Back cover blurb: Exploring the very edge of the known
universe, the Doctor, Leela and K9 discover a group of astronauts
searching for the lost gene bank of Minyan race. During the perilous
voyage, the astronauts' craft plunges into the heart of a recently formed
planet, wherein an awesome secret is hidden. How will the Minyan quest
end? What must the Doctor wrest from the Heart of the Oracle?

Terrance Dicks is no Apollonius of Rhodes. And Doctor Who and the
Underworld is no Argonautica. The story is heavily inspired by the
legends of Jason and the Argonauts, to the point of acknowledging it at
the end, but does sometimes make traditional mistakes, such as calling the
monster guarding the Fleece a dragon when it was in fact a serpent.
However this is a very minor matter and does not detract from a
fast-moving book.

In the printed form the reader is spared the excessive use of CSO and
instead gets an image of a dark network of tunnels that contain an ever
present danger, conjuring up images of a dark scary story. The menace thus
becomes ever stronger, but there are several points where the structure of
the book is weaker, particularly in the way that it exposes the story as
having three neat divisions - the spaceship, the tunnels and the P7E -
with few overlaps between them. This makes the story feel very much like a
serial of connected pieces. Whilst this approach is not dissimilar to some
epics of mythology, it nevertheless fails to work here because the book
simply does not aim to be a heroic tale. It taks more than naming
characters after Jason (Jackson), Orpheus (Orfe), Hercules (Herrick) and
Atalanta (Tala) or randomly talking about trees, quests for golden items
to invoke a true sense of awe-inspiring legend, and so we are left with a
pale imitation trying desperately to be something it simply isn't cut out
to be - not a bad metaphor for much of the Williams' era, it has to be
said.

The book opens with a prologue telling the background to the
relationship between the Time Lords and the Minyans, how the P7E came to
be lost and how Jackson's crew set out to find it, but very little is made
of the significance of this. At this point in the series the Doctor is
still a wanderer who has opted out of Time Lord society (even though the
next story in both transmission and book publication order would move him
to be a very central position...) and so it is hard for any burden of
guilt to naturally rest on his own shoulders. Thus the prologue is left as
little more than a scene setter, and comes across all too easily as pure
narration, avoiding the more conventional method of establishing the
backstory through dialogue coming at a natural point as the Doctor and
Leela (and the reader) slowly discover where the TARDIS has arrived.

There's not much meat at all in this story, either on television or in
book form, but Terrance Dicks does make a good effort to keep the
narrative flowing and so the book works as a quick read. 5/10